Monday Night Combat 'on the fly' updates explained
We mentioned in our Monday Night Combat review (you should read it!) that the game would feature the ability to make balance tweaks "on the fly without needing to do a patch." Considering most Xbox 360 games require a full title update even for the most rudimentary fixes, this makes Monday Night Combat something of a standout. Now, thanks to Penny Arcade, we have an explanation. According to Uber Entertainment's John Comes, the magic comes courtesy of "Title Managed Storage" (TMS), an amount of storage space on Xbox Live servers that Microsoft allows for its developers.
"So what we did," said Comes, "is put a text file with all of our balance numbers up there [on TMS] and when the game starts up it overwrites the balance numbers with any numbers it pulled down off of TMS." As an example, Comes noted that if Uber were to discover that Snipers earn ability-enhancing Juice too fast, the company can easily adjust the corresponding number in TMS. The next time a player boots the game, the adjusted number overwrites the original. Voila, instant balance fix. Now, if someone would just turn the Assassin's cloak ability up to "infinite," we'd be much obliged.
